In July, an international network project involving the Centre for Historical Research Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History was granted the support of two international research funds.Julia Lajus, Head of the Laboratory, told HSE News Service what environmental and technology history is all about, and what role HSE researchers play in the Tensions of Europe international research network.

Researchers with the HSE International Laboratory of Intangible-driven Economy have developed an approach towards analysing strategies for employing intangibles. In the study, which was published in the journal Management Decision, they discovered that only 36.5% of Russian companies are pursuing an intensive intellectual capital strategy.

Three dimensions of subordinate-supervisor relations (affective attachment, deference to supervisor, and personal-life inclusion) that had been found by Chen et al. (2009) to be characteristic of a guanxi relationship between subordinates and their supervisors in China were surveyed in Taiwan, Singapore and six non-Chinese cultural contexts. The affective attachment and deference subscales demonstrated full metric invariance whereas the personal-life inclusion subscale was found to have partial metric invariance across all eight samples. Structural equation modelling revealed that the affective attachment dimension had a cross-nationally invariant positive relationship to affective organizational commitment and a negative relationship to turnover intention. The deference to the supervisor dimension had invariant positive relationships with both affective and normative organizational commitment. The personal-life inclusion dimension was unrelated to all outcomes. These results indicate the relevance of aspects of guanxi to superior-subordinate relations in non-Chinese cultures. Studies of indigenous concepts can contribute to a broader understanding of organizational behavior.

Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultural collectivism. A brief measure was developed and refined across 19 nations (Study 1: N = 5,241), showing good psychometric properties for cross-cultural use and correlating well at the nation level with other supposed facets and indicators of I-C. In Study 2 (N = 8,652), nation-level contextualism predicted ingroup favoritism, corruption, and differential trust of ingroup and outgroup members, while controlling for other facets of I-C, across 35 nations. We conclude that contextualism is an important part of cultural collectivism. This highlights the importance of beliefs alongside values and self-representations and contributes to a wider understanding of cultural processes.

Unlike variable-centered measures, validity and stability of typologies have been rarely
studied. Magun, Rudnev and Schmidt [in review] developed a value typology of the
European population using data from the 4
th round of the European Social Survey. The
value classes showed heuristic power in the comparison of different parts of the European
population, countries in particular, enabling more differentiated interpretations in a
parsimonious way. The current paper tests the stability of this typology by extending the
study to three time points – consecutive surveys in 2008, 2010 and 2012. Conceptually,
this test coincides with measurement invariance testing. We reviewed the levels of
typology measurement invariance. Then, the invariance of the value typology of
Europeans was tested across three rounds of the ESS and it was found to hold configural
and partial invariance. The reliability of the value classes was supported by the stability
of country class probabilities across the time points as well. The correlations of the
country shares of the value classes with the economic development of countries are also
invariant at the three time points. The results imply that the value classification of
Europeans is not ad hoc, but reflects the natural structure of European societies, and can
be used in future studies

Managers in five nations rated scenarios exemplifying indigenous forms of informal influence whose cultural origins were concealed. Locally generated scenarios illustrated episodes of guanxi, wasta, jeitinho, svyazi and pulling strings. Local scenarios were judged representative of local influence processes but so too were some scenarios derived from other contexts. Furthermore, many scenarios were rated as more typical in non-local contexts. While these influence processes are found to be widely disseminated, they occur more frequently in contexts characterized by high self-enhancement values, low self-transcendence values and high endorsement of business corruptibility. Implications for a fuller understanding of local business practices are discussed.

The aim of this study is to examine the specific antecedents and consequences of the commitment of university teachers to their university. Academia has specific features that distinguish universities from other types of organizations: universities have the opportunity to hire their own graduates (academic inbreeding); university teachers are able to work in several higher education institutions or combine teaching with work in business; university teachers have the opportunity to combine several professional roles (teaching, administrative work, research, etc.); university teachers have several options to change their job; publication activity is an important indicator of the efficiency and competitiveness of university teachers. This study is an online survey of 317 teachers of different disciplines from several types of state higher education institutions from different regions of Russia. The results of the regression analysis show that antecedents of affective commitment include belonging to a group of insiders (working in university from which they graduated), having an additional administrative position, role clarity, and role conflict. Structural equation modelling shows that an additional administrative position had a direct positive effect and an indirect negative effect (through role conflict) on the affective commitment to the university. Having work experience at another university predicts only a normative commitment to the university. The affective component of commitment to the university was a better negative predictor of the intention to leave the position, profession and institution. No components of the commitment predict publication activity.

Purpose: the use of performance management (PM) tools is a defining characteristic of public sector management. However, while research on PM is extensive, comparatively little focuses on how the practice shapes the attitudes and behavior of employees. This article addresses this question and develops a conditional process model that links PM to turnover intention. The model predicts that the PM-turnover relationship is mediated by job satisfaction and moderated by job-goal alignment.

Design and methodology: We use a unique dataset drawn from the Russian public sector to test the model empirically. Conditional process modeling is used to test for moderated mediation. The effects are further explored using bootstrapped bias-corrected confidence intervals.

Findings: The analysis suggests that PM has an indirect effect on turnover intention via job satisfaction in the average case. However, the indirect effect is stronger for employees who perceive that their work contributes directly to organizational goals. In contrast, for employees whose work lacks organizational goal alignment, PM has no significant effect.

Originality: Despite being an instrument to manage organizational (including human) resources, few studies have linked PM to employee-level outcomes. By doing so, this study implies promising research paths that can help generate a more complete picture of how PM shapes organizational processes in the public sector.

Unlike commonly used, anomie and alienation not only have different theoretical backgrounds, but also different indicators and predictors. I examine the highly institutionalized alienation scale originally introduced by Middleton (1963), reapplied as a measurement of alienation (Seeman, 1991) and anomie (Huschka and Mau 2005, 2006) in a very relevant context for an anomic situation – the post-Communist countries Russia and Kazakhstan (round six of the World Values Surveys fielded the alienation question in just these two countries). Based on confirmatory factor analysis and multiple group comparisons, I find that the scale consists of two dimensions, which can be described as an anomie and alienation. The anomic dimension consists of indicators “normlessness” and “powerlessness,” whereas the alienative one is comprised by “social isolation”, “meaninglessness,” and “job dissatisfaction.” Though the structure proves to have full invariance in both countries, the predictors for anomie and alienation are different. For both countries, only income is an important predictor for anomie, and though to a lower degree, for alienation. In Kazakhstan, the level of urbanization also provides an impact on the level of anomie. Apart from income, in Russia alienation can be predicted by gender, and type of occupation (manual or intellectual), whereas in Kazakhstan it can be predicted by age